Bertrand Meyer’s Object-Oriented Software Construction. Back in the early nineties this was just about all that was available. While it does emphasise the behavioural view of objects, the use of Eiffel doesn’t help, and there’s little help with concepts such as refactoring or the need to eliminate duplication.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock’s Designing Object-Oriented Software. I’ve always liked this book, but for some reason British Java programmers never seem comfortable with it. And again, it has little to say about code structure or quality.

Kent Beck’s Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. This is my favourite of the three, because the patterns directly apply to refactoring code into great designs. But again, I’ve found that Java programmers seem scared to death of reading smalltalk.

Is Object Thinking what I’ve been looking for? Or is there another book out there that can show talented programmers what great code looks like?

6 thoughts on “object thinking”

By gum, that’s a blast from the past! Thanks for reminding me about Taylor’s book – I last used it on a project in 1996. It worked extremely well for managers and business analysts, I recall. But it never helped the programmers and designers ‘get’ the style of good object-oriented code, for some reason…